Part 5

During the lawsuit above mentioned he realized what a danger to the people lay in gambling. The change from war conditions to a state of affairs which afforded the nation little relief from tension had not sobered its imagination, but rather excited it yet more strongly. Perhaps, in the first instance, the war news was largely responsible for extravagant phantasies. For a week, sometimes a month, at a time the reports were like a lottery for the whole nation. Then a fateful movement was set on foot by which whole districts of people were seized with a passion for gambling, a movement designed by the military authorities to induce them to replete the army coffers. Increased wages were offered to the war workers and money was flung into manufacturing concerns. Commerce of all kinds was affected ere long, and everywhere the flood-gates were opened. When goods grew more and more scarce, money overflowed all its channels. Wenk saw clearly that the folks in high places who had believed they could purchase the soul of a nation for money were to blame for the tragic outcome of the war as far as Germany was concerned, and so, too, were they responsible for the political development. Instead of the ideal of an immortal soul prepared for any and every renunciation as long as it fulfilled its duty to the community, they had set up an idol--money--and the whole nation was worshipping it.

Then the war came to an end. Money decreased in value and the idea of it played a yet more dominant part in the life of a nation now deprived of its success and brilliance in the world outside. Hundreds of thousands had become accustomed to a life of inaction, and for many years now it had been nothing but pure chance whether they lived or died. Their only preoccupation had been to exercise authority over others and to live entirely on their nerves. They brought with them to the more stable conditions of life the gambling spirit born of their war experience. They had grown accustomed to taking risks, and they continued to rely on luck. They resumed their former mode of life, but brought to it the atmosphere of their recent experiences, transferring the nerve-racking and hazardous existence of those days to the conditions which now obtained. To some extent this was inevitable, but those who looked beyond the present and wanted to see a new era of prosperity dawn must strain every nerve and exercise the strictest self-denial. Thus only could there be hope of recovery.

The great lawsuit had afforded Wenk one example after another of the development of this spirit of gambling, and in its course had taken him frequently into the company of those who lived but for, and by, games of chance. His convictions were well grounded and his recognition of the national danger constantly confirmed to an alarming extent. In the attics and basements folks were gambling for five-mark pieces, and on the first floors for five-thousand. They laid their wagers in the streets and the lanes, at home and abroad. They gambled with cards, with goods, with ideas and with enjoyments, with power and with weakness, with themselves and with their nearest and dearest.

At this period, too, people who were not naturally given to hazardous risks, who were habitually calm and self-reliant, were wont to be guided by chance conditions and circumstances, instead of combating them where necessary.

Wenk was an official who had reached his thirty-eighth year in a peaceful and well-ordered career. During the war he had volunteered for the Flying Corps, because he had a love of sport and remembered the fascination which the element of danger had held for him in early youth. The experience had fired his imagination, and he returned to his career with more impetuous feelings than had been his when he quitted it. The lawsuit against the gamblers, and all he had learned in the course of it, had excited him considerably. He had gone at once to the head of the Police Department, had described what he had seen and experienced, and represented to him that this new disease must be combated if the whole body were not to be destroyed. As money lost its value and the necessities of life increased, the nation could do nothing but seek to augment its mass of paper currency by trying first one speculation and then another. The connection between supply and demand required both time and work before it could become normal again, and so by degrees it had come about that the pulsations of commercial life were regulated merely by chance.

The Minister smiled; he was new to his office. He said, “The nation is sound enough; you are a pessimist!”

But Wenk replied, “It is diseased and rotten! How can it be healthy, after such years and such a life?”

Then the Minister, who felt his position somewhat insecure and was willing to try anything that might lead to stability, yielded the point, and created a new post, which Wenk at once took over.

The erstwhile State Attorney and official was at once caught up in the vortex of his new office. He devoted all his time and energies to it. He did not establish himself in an arm-chair in a comfortable well-furnished room, but began to build up his position from the very bottom, became a police-spy and a detective, unwearied in his efforts to collect all the evidence he could lay his hands on. He did it all himself, and when he realized, as he soon did, the slight extent of his own powers when pitted against the widespread national vice, he conceived the idea of recruiting a guard and rallying force from the ranks of the victims.

Accordingly, he began with men whose wealth was not displayed in their houses, but who, through their connection with the social order which had come to grief, had been forced into the opposition, both as human beings and as politicians. He knew that none were more responsible for the existing state of affairs than these men, because, at a time when resistance was a necessity, they had been cowardly and kept out of the way. But he knew, too, that in them a new force of decision had come to birth, that they longed to make good where they had failed.

Above all, there were the rich young men without any profession. In the disorganization brought about in the country by the depreciation and disorder of the currency, they were unable to carry on life as before. Their society was permeated by the “new rich,” who made use of them because they allowed themselves to be made use of.

The State Attorney von Wenk had turned to his whilom comrades, from whom the divers duties of his office had long separated him, and the man whom he had first encountered and won over to his side was Karstens. It was from him that he had learned all the circumstances of Hull’s strange and suspicious gambling adventure. He compared Hull’s story with the other material which he had hastily collected. Fresh complaints were constantly being made about swindlers who worked so cleverly that no taint of suspicion could attach to them, yet who won so consistently that it was not conceivable that this could be merely luck. From some similarities in detail in the various stories Wenk was inclined to refer all these cases to a band of swindlers operating in concert, and he even had the idea that it might all be the work of one man. But this was hardly more than an impression. Hull’s experience was the strangest and most mysterious of all these cases, and it was fraught with the greatest danger, but Wenk had a notion that therein lay the solution to all the rest.

* * * * *

After Wenk’s departure, Hull held a long argument with himself. The uncompromising yet thoroughly courteous way in which Wenk had effected an entrance had made an impression upon him. He guessed what the official desired, for he himself was often dissatisfied with his way of living, although his love of ease usually made him drive such thoughts away.

Under ordinary circumstances he would have pursued his usual search for enjoyment without restraint or reflection, either until considerations of health had set a limit to his dissipations or until a marriage, either arranged or entered into voluntarily, had caused him to “range himself.”

Hull by no means approved of the course of affairs in Germany which had led to the Treaty of Versailles. He at once asked himself, “Where were you in 1918, when the retreat began? and earlier still, when it first began to be planned? Are not you, Hull, and all your kind, responsible for it?”... That was what Herr von Wenk’s words had implied.

But Hull found in himself no trace of such individuality as might have saved the situation, and he dismissed these ideas from his mind. He drove to see Cara Carozza and told her of Wenk’s visit.

“For God’s sake, don’t get us mixed up with your State Attorney, dear Eddie,” said she.

“But ... but ... do we cheat? Are we dishonest? Are we profiteers, or climbers? We merely keep ourselves going. What are you thinking about, darling?”

“Eddie, a game of cards in full swing--someone holding the bank--closed doors, and a State official looking on! That might prove a hanging matter!”

“But I promised him I would bring you!”

“More fool you!” she exclaimed. “You ought to have got out of it somehow. Elsie is bringing her friend to-day, and we are going to Schramm’s. Karstens has already telephoned that he will be there.”

“Then Wenk would be coming anyhow, so that’s all right, as it happens!”

The head-waiter of Schramm’s little restaurant, recently opened in one of the residential streets and decorated throughout in most eccentric style by a modern professional, led Karstens and Wenk from the dinner-table to a box at the rear. Thence a winding stair led to a room which had no other exit and seemed to have no windows of any kind.

In the middle of the room stood a fairly large table of an oval shape, but so arranged that every occupant of an arm-chair was sitting in a hollowed-out niche of his own, with the leaves of the table under his elbows on both sides. The table was formed of quaint, curiously veined Kiefersfeld marble. In the middle only was there a perfectly white oval left. Around the table, behind the players’ chairs, the floor was raised and the walls furnished with full-length reclining lounges, upon which rested crushed-strawberry-coloured cushions with black designs. A large shade of polished glass attached to a brass electrolier hung low over the table and reflected the electric light bulbs which gleamed forth from silver brackets. The walls above the strawberry-coloured cushions were inlaid with the same warm marble as that on the table.

Wenk was introduced to Cara Carozza.

“I could not keep the secret, Herr von Wenk. I was obliged to tell my lady friend here. Please don’t be vexed with me!”

Wenk gave a slight bow, in which there was a trace of annoyance.